At the races with the Kangaroo TV

Ars goes to the races with the Kangaroo TV, a handheld Linux device that …

Getting the best of both worlds

As anyone who follows racing knows, it can often be a lot harder to follow what's going on when you're actually at the track compared to watching it from the comfort of your own couch. Racing cars are loud, and they tend to drown out the trackside announcers. Although most tracks today have large screens, you aren't always guaranteed a good view of one.

What's more, now that we have the Internet, different racing series now offer the chance to have live timing via a web interface, and for an additional fee you can even stream onboard camera footage to supplement what your TV is showing you. These are all pretty neat things to have if you're a racing fan, so it can sometimes feel like a step backwards to sit in 90?F weather, baking in a grandstand, as you watch the cars whizz past once every minute or so.

On the other hand, your living room probably doesn't let you work on your tan, you can't smell the cars, and you don't feel them as the sound waves penetrate your body (and you miss out on the track food). Now there's a way to combine the best of both venues, and it doesn't involve having someone sell you smoked turkey legs in your kitchen.

The Kangaroo TV is a handheld device that's being made available at Formula 1 races this year, along with NASCAR races, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and a few football games. You can rent it for the day, the weekend, or, in the case of NASCAR, you will even be able to buy the device and use it to follow what's going on during those times when the cars aren't in view.

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Since Ars Technica has more than a passing interest in technology, and since I have more than a passing interest in motor racing, I decided to combine the two at a recent trip to the US Grand Prix at Indianapolis to find out a little bit more about the Kangaroo TV and how it works.

You can either book the unit online or find their retail tent at the track and sign up there and then. A quick sign of a contract and a swipe of a credit card later, and you get handed a drawstring bag containing the Kangaroo TV, a pair of in-ear headphones, a spare battery and a charger. The Kangaroo TV also comes equipped with a lanyard so you don't need to worry about dropping it when it's time to grab another cold one out of the cooler. The battery promises about six hours of life, so with the spare and the charger, you shouldn't run out of juice over a race weekend. You get to keep the earphones at the end of the day; a good move since they're not really the sort of thing you want to be sharing with random strangers.

The unit is coated in a rubberized plastic, handy in case of rain or beverage incident. It has a number of covered ports: one for the earbuds, a mini USB port, and an SD card slot. Of these, the earbud slot is the only one you need to be concerned about. Neither of the other two seemed to do much; we plugged the Kangaroo TV into a Macbook and a Fujitsu Lifebook to no avail, and sticking an SD card into the slot didn't achieve anything either. According to Alain Charette, Kangaroo TV's VP of corporate development, currently the ports are only used for firmware upgrades, but in the future they could allow for expansion of the device, such as games or music playback. Given the downtimes between races, this seems like a pretty good idea to me.

Inside the shell is an ARM processor running Linux. In addition to this, there's a dedicated hardware decoder that processes the MPEG4 stream that gets picked up by the UHF antenna poking out the top of the unit. Regarding that UHF signal: it was always strong inside the confines of the race track, but even a short distance away in the car, signal strength dropped away to nothing. Race tracks can be large places; Le Mans is 8 miles around, for example, and Kangaroo uses multiple antennas at each track to get the best coverage within the circuit. The streams are encoded, though, so don't expect to be able to take your laptop along with a UHF antenna and leech the feed!